Fereydoun Hormozdiari, an early-career UC Davis scientist, has been named a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology. He is one of 126 scholars to receive the prestigious award, which comes with $60,000 over two years to conduct leading-edge research.

Hormozdiari Fereydoun

Hormozdiari, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the School of Medicine, specializes in computational biology and genomics. His research mainly explores the underlying causes of complex disorders, such as autism and intellectual disability. He is developing and utilizing novel computational methods to find the potential genetic variants that contribute to these disorders.

“It is like looking for a specific needle in a stack of needles,” he said.

Hormozdiari joined the UC Davis faculty in September of 2015 and is affiliated with the Genome Center and the UC Davis MIND Institute. He received his master of science and doctorate degrees in computing science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and a bachelor of science degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

The Afred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants to support original research and broad-based education related to science, technology, and economic performance; and to improve the quality of American life. Candidates for the research fellowship awards must have earned a Ph.D. or equivalent degree after September 2009 in the field of chemistry, computational or evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, ocean sciences, physics or a related field.

At the UC Davis MIND Institute, world-renowned scientists engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary research to find the causes of and develop treatments and cures for autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), fragile X syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Down syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. For more information, visit mindinstitute.ucdavis.edu.